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Arete: The Meaning of Life

March, 2008

12 Comments

I’ll admit that this is an ambitious post title. Thinkers have struggled against this question for thousands of years. One of the interesting things about this question is that the answers don’t converge on a single point. Instead there are many different methods to answer what might be the most important human question.

I’m certainly not going to answer that question in a blog post. Not only would that be incredibly presumptuous of me, but I think it sort of misses the point. Who wants to live a life where you’re handed all the correct answers in advance?

Instead, I’d like to focus on one viewpoint to this problem that I stumbled upon recently. This is a perspective I hadn’t heard before and nicely deals with some of the uncomfortable problems I feel have been brought up with the current Western stance on the problem. This answer to the meaning of life is simply: arete.

What is Arete?

Arete is an ancient Greek word meaning excellence or virtue. The arete of something is the highest quality state it can reach. Using arete as a principle for living life means that you are focused on the quality of everything you do and experience. Avoid actions that lack arete. Take actions that focus on arete.

When most people think of virtue, they look at moral virtue. But arete as a way of describing quality, touches on much more than that. A beautiful painting can have arete, even though it isn’t ethically superior to a dull painting.

I believe arete is a more comprehensive way of viewing life than the two main directions I see from popular Western philosophies.

Happiness or Service? Pick a Side.

I’m grossly simplifying philosophy here (so if you’re well versed in philosophical teachings, hopefully you won’t take offense to my blunt-club treatment of the topic). But in most of the readings I’ve done of major Western views on the meaning of life, I could clump them into two broad categories: happiness or service.

Pursuing Love and Happiness

“Don’t worry, be happy.” – Bobby McFerrin

The first viewpoint is that the ultimate meaning in life is happiness. Not just the naive happiness of short-term pleasure, but the long-term, pursuit of your dreams, happiness. From this viewpoint, your goal should be to maximize your long-term happiness by taking the best actions you feel will reach you there.

As a whole, I don’t feel this philosophy is completely broken. While a few people might be able to achieve happiness without connecting and providing value to the world, I don’t think most could. So the naive view that this philosophy degenerates into addiction and selfishness isn’t valid.

But the problem with this philosophy is that it isn’t always practical. Happiness can often twist on itself when you make it the goal of your actions. Getting the dream job, spouse or million dollars leaves you as unhappy as you were before. Pursuing happiness completely may also feel somewhat shallow as if the entire point of your existence rests on a few neurotransmitters in your brain.

Pursuing Service and Purpose

“At first I thought that life was joy. Then I learned that life was duty. Finally, I acted and, behold, duty was joy.” – Rabindranath Tagore

The second stream of Western thought in my blunt-club look at life philosophies is focusing on purpose and service. This stream of thought usually focuses on helping other people as a means of achieving meaning in life.

Just with our first philosophical stream, the naive view points out that a life devoted to service misses out on happiness. You’re so busy helping others that you don’t have a chance to enjoy life for yourself. I don’t feel this is a valid criticism, because as Tagore said, “duty was joy.” Serve and you will be happy.

But like the other philosophy, I feel this approach suffers from a weakness. The philosophy, if you look at it closely, tends to loop back on itself. The meaning of your life comes from having a purpose. Therefore your purpose is to have a purpose. It doesn’t take too much thinking to wonder whether there is a purpose to your purpose.

I don’t feel this small flaw destroys an entire viewpoint of the world, but it does make it somewhat less useful.

Pursuing Arete

“And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good — Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?” – Socrates

Instead of using words like “happiness” or “purpose” I prefer the word arete. Arete, covers the idea that there is an excellence in everything. Pursuing that excellence, whether it creates happiness for yourself or service for others, should be your ultimate goal. I see both happiness and service as being subsets of the larger domain of arete.

Who decides what has quality? I’m not going to touch this question and instead tell you to read Robert Pirsig’s, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig believed that quality (or arete) was the underlying substance of the universe, from which both the subjective and objective are derived. Quality creates the mind and it creates the world.

On a more practical level, arete is a nifty word to have. It fits easily in the backpocket of your life philosophy and makes it easier to decide what you should focus on. Instead of focusing on just your total happiness or your total service, you focus on the quality of whatever you do.

Here are a few ways I’ve been trying to incorporate the philosophy of arete into my own life:

Gym Workouts. To me, strength, speed and flexibility are all signs of arete. Rather than put my emphasis on goals when exercising (from the happiness philosophy) or how being healthy will help me aid society (service philosophy), I focus on quality. Therefore, when I’m at the gym, I try to make my goal to have private excellence: lifting more weight, running faster or working harder.

Blog Writing. The happiness/service split here would be focusing on writing articles that will get me massive traffic flows or focusing on writing articles that will provide immense value to people. Instead I’d like to focus on arete–making each article the best expression of an idea that I can within the constraints.

Relationships. Instead of focusing on how people can help me, or how I can help people, focus on arete. What is quality in a relationship? My guess would be connection, sharing, loyalty, deep conversations or laughter.

Knowledge. I’m reading through The Wealth of Nations right now for fun. The book is difficult to read and requires more effort than a more entertaining novel. Why am I reading it? Because, for me, this book has arete. It represents a significant leap forward in human thought and I want to be a part of that journey Adam Smith started.

Food. Instead of eating for taste, weight goals or even long-term health, eat for arete. Eat the foods that have quality to you. This applies both in taste and nutrition. Eating greasy junk or cardboard-flavored health snacks both fail my model of arete.

Speech. Are your sentences peppered with um’s and ah’s? Do your words have clarity and meaning, or do you not know when to shut up? I’ve been trying to debug my communication patterns to help fit in with this model of quality.

These are just a few examples, but I thought I’d like to demonstrate a few of the practical applications from a life philosophy. I like to view philosophies to be like algorithms for life. If you have a great algorithm, you can solve problems with few flaws. Arete, while it isn’t perfect, is a fantastic algorithm for life.

That’s a very interesting take on life. And I must say that it hits home, much more than happiness or service. If we are focusing on the quality of something, we are always trying to take and do the best of what we choose to do. If you like to read, you may read something thought provoking rather than a cheesy romance novel. If you like to play video games, you might play something that requires strategy and planning, something that is a little more difficult and perhaps different from what you already play. Quality can be applied to everything, because there are good ‘versions’ and bad ‘versions’ of everything. Some are universal while others vary from person to person. I like!

Yynatago

I’ve been wanting a better simplified way to describe the two main groups of western philosophy and you’ve put it perfectly with “happiness or service”. While I totally disagree that arete is the meaning of life, it certainly seems like a great guide for living life.

Thank you Scott. Saying this reinforces something I have believed for a long time. It is the quality of any experience that determines it’s nature, not the ability to measure it statistically. Arete has now entered my vocabulary.

http://www.academicppd.com Charlie Gilkey

We’re kindred spirits, you and I. I’ve recently begun to think of personal development and productivity in terms of dead Greek ideas, as well. Being a philosopher, I might disagree with the blunt treatment, but it’s not a bad way to broad-brush the different streams.

The hybrid view is actually Aristotelian, though. Fuse arete, virtue, and a thing’s function and you get to ask the question what is it about this thing that makes it excellent. For humans, that’s eudaimonia, or flourishing.

The reason I say that this is a blend in the two streams is because one of the ways we flourish is through social interaction (under your heading of service). Social obligations and duties, taken to the extreme, lead to a state in which we’re not flourishing. However, not acting on any social obligation also leads to sub-optimal flourishing.

According to a statistics, there are 430 million English speaking internet users. Are they enough to answer the biggest question? What would happen if all of them visited this website and wrote a sentence? Would we find the ultimate answer? I don’t think so, but who knows…

Our only goal is to collect as many of these sentences as possible.

What about you? Have you ever thought about the reason of life? Do you have a minute to do that now?

We just need a sentence! It can be funny or serious, happy or sad, philosophical or casual. It can be your own thought or a quote from your favourite writer or just from the grocer around the corner.

It has to meet just one requirement! It should be one of the endless possible answers to the question:

Another decent blog. You are asking all the right questions.
Again, it all comes down to balance. You cannot have the Yin (happiness), without the Yang(purpose/service) and vice/versa. If you you follow my “live in 3D” understanding, you realize that we are complexed creatures that cannot live life in only one dimension. We must satisfy our creativity, love, comfort, success, relationships, sense of freedom, and security iches. If we don’t scratch any one of these, the ich only becomes more bothersome.
Many things we do can satisfy one or many of these iches.

(ex. life as an ebay Powerseller might be filled with creating/building new niches of stuff to sell (creativity) while selling from home (comfort) and taking days off to be with family (sense of freedom/relationships/love) After collecting his fees and building up his financial reserves, he can relax and enjoy other hobbies. (success/security)

http://www.scotthyoung.com Scott Young

Loren,

Great ideas, I’ve appreciated your comments on some recent entries.

-Scott

http://www.orangeshirtguy.com Dave Thurston

Scott, how is this working out? a bit of time has passed since you posted this – how are you keeping arete on the front burner?

http://www.scotthyoung.com Scott Young

Dave,

It’s continuing. Arete is more philosophy than specific application, so I keep it in my focus more generally. But thanks for the comment.

Excellent resource. I read a lot of classical philosophy, but I have been branching out farther into contemporary philosophy. Thank you for the posts.

Alexandra Corbett Dekanova

What about digging a bit deeper? The excellence is a beautiful idea at first sight but we could see e. g. the excellence, perfection in nazi extermination of the Jews in Auschwitz. When asking about the meaning of life I would prefer something absolute and add arete to it.

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About Scott

I'm a writer, programmer, traveler and avid reader of interesting things. For the last eight years I've been experimenting to find out how to learn and think better.
I don't promise I have all the answers, just a place to start.